抄録
In Japanese, there is a set of sentence-final particles exclusively used by women, indicating the gender of the speaker. Although these female-particles (FPs) have been less likely to be used in modern Japanese, they are still frequently employed in the translation of foreign novels or the Japanese subtitles of foreign movies. They are also used in Japanese comic books for girls or TV dramas, where the female characters speak with FPs only when they are excited, or angry etc. In this paper, the meanings and the functions of FPs are examined, and it is argued that they have acquired two pragmatically derived meanings; 1) the marker that the speaker is a non-Japanese woman and 2) the marker that the speaker wants to convey some feelings or emotions depending on the context. It is considered that both meanings were derived as the frequency of the FP-use decreased: Because the FP is not commonly used in everyday speech, it is implied that the speaker using FPs is less likely to be a Japanese native speaker. On the other hand, when a person speaks with FPs that she hardly uses, it is implied that she wants to convey some special feelings such as excitement, anger, confidence etc.
https://ror.org/012322w18 
